Se il sole muore by Orianna Fallaci

“I enjoy being 30, I drink my 30s like a liqueur, I don’t shrivel up in premature old age, cyclostyled on carbon paper. Listen, Cernam, White, Bean, Armstrong, Gordon, Chaffee: being 30 is great, and so is being 31, 32, 33, 34, 35! It’s a great age because it’s free, rebellious, illegal, because the stress of waiting for it is over, the melancholy of decline hasn’t started, because we’re finally lucid at 30!

If we’re devout, we’re staunchly devout. If we’re atheists, we’re staunchly atheist. If we’re dubious, we’re not ashamed of it. And we’re not afraid of pranks by the kids because we’re still kids, too, we’re not afraid of being scolded by the adults because we’re adults, too. We’re not afraid of sin because we’ve understood that sin is a point of view, we’re not afraid of disobedience because we’ve discovered that disobedience is noble. We’re not afraid of being punished because we’ve decided there’s nothing wrong in loving if we meet, of letting ourselves go if we get lost: we don’t have to reckon with the teacher any more and we don’t need to reckon with the priest and his holy oil. We reckon with ourselves, and that’s it, with our grown-up’s suffering.

We’re a field of ripe wheat at 30, no longer green and not yet dried up: the sap is coursing through us at the right pressure, full of life. Our every joy is alive, our every suffering is alive, we laugh and cry like we’ll never be able to again, we think and we understand like we’ll never be able to again. We’ve reached the peak of the mountain and everything is clear up there on the peak: the road we climbed and the one we’ll go down by. A little out of breath but still fresh, we won’t sit down half-way any more to look back and look forward and wonder about our future: so why isn’t it like that for you? Why do you seem like my fathers, crushed by fears, by boredom, by baldness? What have they done to you, what have you done to yourselves? What price did you have to pay for the moon? The moon is expensive, I know. It’s expensive for all of us, but no cost is worth that field of wheat, no price is worth that mountaintop. If it were, there’d be no point in going to the moon, we might as well stay here.

So wake up, quit being so rational, obedient, wrinkled! Quit losing your hair, quit feeling so down in your equality! Tear up the carbon paper. Laugh, cry, make mistakes. Hit out at the Bureaucrat watching his stop-watch. I say it in all humility, with love, because I respect you, because I see you as better than me and I wish you were much better than me. Much better, not just a little better. Or is it too late? Or has the System already crushed you, swallowed you up? Yes, that’s how it has to be.”

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